Indonesia looking for sub that might be too deep to help
Indonesian navy ships searched Thursday for a submarine that likely sank too deep to retrieve, making survival chances for the 53 people on board slim. Authorities said oxygen in the submarine would run out by early Saturday.
The diesel-powered KRI Nanggala 402 was participating in a training exercise Wednesday when it missed a scheduled reporting call. Officials reported an oil slick and the smell of diesel fuel near the starting position of its last dive, about 60 miles north of the resort island of Bali, though there was no conclusive evidence they were linked to the submarine.
“Hopefully we can rescue them before the oxygen has run out” at 3 a.m. on Satur- day, Indonesia’s navy chief of staff, Adm. Yudo Margono, told reporters. He said rescuers found an unidentified object with high magnetism at a depth of 165 to 330 feet and that officials hope it’s the submarine.
The navy believes the submarine sank to a depth of 2,000-2,300 feet, much deeper than its estimated collapse depth.
Ahn Guk-hyeon, an official from South Korea’s Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering, which refitted the vessel in 2009-2012, said the submarine would collapse if it goes deeper than around 655 feet because of pressure. He said his company upgraded much of the submarine’s internal structures and systems but lacks recent information about the vessel.
Frank Owen, secretary of the Submarine Institute of Australia, also said the submarine could be at too great a depth for a rescue team to operate.
“Most rescue systems are really onlyrated to about 600 meters (1,970 feet),” he said. “They can go deeper than that because they will have a safety margin built into the design, but the pumps and other systems that are associated with that may not have the capacity to oper- ate. So they can survive at that depth, but not necessarily operate.”